i. An Invocation

Sociology is the study of people as beings. If we accept that others impact us, and we on others, then it is a necessary pursuit. It is not a piddling introspection or contrived contrarianism, it is the discipline of understanding how humans live — together.

Yet despite this, sociology is often overlooked, dismissed, or forgotten. It shirks mention in name, even as it saturates the everyday framing of the world. Social terms like structure, system, norm, inequality — these sociological inheritances have been left vagrant. Their sharpness now wanders in interdisciplinary generality.

This is a rally to what sociology is, and what it must be for those who take it seriously. Not what it once was, or could be, but what it continues as for those still impassioned by her knowledge.

It is easy to be critical in complexity, to flatten and compress the granular beauty of the being. Those who study society know this too well. The social world is often hard to describe, harder still to see, and burdensome to keep seeing.

ii. Sociological Sight

C. Wright Mills gave sociology a language for its method: the sociological imagination. It endures — a shorthand for the capacity to see structural conditions in personal experience. Mills believed this lens could be broadly adopted, that it was a cloak one might throw off at any time. He felt at the seriousness of being, but never realised such a cape should have to hold the heft of the world. And by being kind, we have mistaken empathy for Verstehen, replaced rigour with critique.¹ 

Sociology is not just imagined. It is seen. It is not poetic philosophising or light imagining, but the flaying of the self to see as others. It is not an internal retreat; it is holding our eyes wide open into the glare of everything everyone has ever done — and seeing it for what it is. Seeing the structures, systems, and norms that guidepost, flag, and explain our world. This takes effort. It takes rich energy. It needs rigour. Most of all, it requires a sacrifice of the self — each and every time.

To be sociological is to see with clarity the total fidelity of the world. To live with and understand its temptations for normativity and epistemic certainty. Yet we also stomach the knowledge that these social constructions — economic, historical, institutional, cultural — are mere abstractions of the real lived past.

Sociology is not fantasy, not imagination, but being-with what is there.

iii. Criticality vs Critique

Sociology today is too often mistaken for social critique. Critique has become its posture, its performance, its default and marketable condition. But sociology is not the study of critique. It is the study of society and structure. And to study society is not to oppose it, but to reveal it.

Dialectical frames, Marxist tools, structural inversion—they have value. They help us see and name. They must continue to. But not as critique, as illumination. 

To treat opposition as methodology is to flatten the field into theatre. Sociology does not require us to take sides. It requires us to see — to observe, to trace, to understand the world in its actual arrangement, not its convenient foil.

To be sociological is not to play judge, but to hold court in clarity. There are of course times to condemn action. But first we must look, understand, and draw out the shape of the thing — not rush to heap disparagement.

We must resist the drift toward critique-as-identity. When sociological work becomes a contest of disruption, we lose our vocation. We become curators of outrage, not students of a discipline. There is a difference between being critical and being driven to critique. The first is seeing. The second is compulsion.

Sociology cannot afford to become reflexive dissent. It must remain structured attention — willing to praise, willing to condemn, sometimes reflexive, but always committed to being-with.

iv. Serious Sociology

Sociology has given us the language of social meaning but has failed to convey itself publicly as meaningful. It has become visible in quips and quotes, dissolved into compartments and departments. It has enabled the sciences to speak structure into being and then failed to speak for itself. This is not just marginalisation — it is a grave misunderstanding. And it is, in part, sociology’s own fault.

The discipline has not died, but its depth has caused dispossession. Its ideals and methods now live amongst the other social sciences: anthropology, psychology, economics, gender studies, social work, criminology, policy analysis. Its terms—race, anomie, capital, class, stigma, system—are everywhere. But its name rarely is. Now we have become a ghostly iron-shell of stratification and reification. We give caution; the others brandish clarity. We give counsel; they hurry answers.

This is not wrong. But it is dangerous.

This dislocation has consequences. Without a name, there is no intellectual bastion. Without our castle, there is no protection. Sociology is trained to map power, not secure it. Whilst economists sold models, psychologists sold tests, criminologists sold frameworks, sociology remained hesitant. We mapped and failed to build. Serious, but belated.

Our seriousness is not stagnation. The field’s internal fragments — quantitative, qualitative, theoretical, applied — are not in disorder, but reflective of the object's complexity. Sociology’s breadth is not its weakness. Its discomfort is not a confusion. It is rather, a fidelity to the world as it is.

For it was sociology that helped us name the invisible: role conflict, cultural capital, social construction, the habitus. These concepts gave place to experience, a language to what was felt, and a scope for criticality and analysis.

The field does not need reinvention, but refocusing and action. To be sociological is not to escape into abstraction. It is to remain with the real — unfashionable, uncomfortable, and incomplete. But not incomprehensible.

v. Why Vocation?

Sociology is a field. But it must also be a vocation. It is not simply a set of theories or methods. It is a disciplined practice, and a demand to keep seeing — even when it is hard to bear.

To do sociology well requires more than interest. It needs rigour, energy, and above all, the willingness to be open and changed by what one learns. Reflexive Verstehen must be an ability to see through others’ eyes, not sentimentally but structurally — not an easy skill. It must be cultivated and laborious.

This is not elitism, but it is effort. Sociology is not inaccessible, but it is not intuitive. Anyone may begin to hold it, but to wield it readily is to give something up: the self.

To remain with the social world in its fullness — unresolved, inequitable, incomplete — without escape: that is where one can see. And that, at its core, is how sociology is vocation.

1. I use Verstehen in its Weberian sense: interpretive understanding grounded in social context, rather than empathy or psychological projection. It remains one of sociology’s most serious methodological commitments. I also draw from Weber's depiction of Baxter's cloak. Capitalism like sociology, has an ideational framing that proceeds and shapes the subject beyond any actors wishes otherwise.

2. This post draws loosely in spirit from Max Weber’s Science as a Vocation (1919), but focuses not on the scientist, but the sociologist—and what the discipline now asks of those who still take it seriously.